[EL] Foley op-Ed

Fri Feb 5 15:01:22 PST 2021

It’s a nice piece, although I continue to prefer automatic voter registration at all NVRA offices (and add some more), at all of which the voters identity is actually verified, and provision of a photo ID at the same time, gratis.  Photo IDs do come in handy.  

And I am deeply disappointed at the failure to plug the John Tanner Fair Redistricting Act.  

Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 5, 2021, at 11:19 AM, Rick Hasen <rhasen at law.uci.edu> wrote:
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> “Sen. Warner to unveil bill reining in Section 230, seeking to help users fight back against real-world harm”
> Posted on February 5, 2021 8:11 am by Rick Hasen
> WaPo:
> Sen. Mark Warner is set to introduce a new bill that could hold Facebook, Google and other tech giants more directly accountable when viral online posts and videos result in real-world harm.
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> The measure is dubbed the SAFE TECH Act, and it marks the latest salvo from congressional lawmakers against Section 230. The decades-old federal rules help facilitate free expression online, but Democrats including Warner say they also allow the most profitable tech companies to skirt responsibility for hate speech, election disinformation and other dangerous content spreading across the web.
> The senator’s new proposal preserves the thrust of Section 230, which generally spares a wide array of website operators from being held liable for what their users say. Instead, it opens an easier legal pathway for Web users to seek court orders and file lawsuits if posts, photos and videos — and the tech industry’s refusal to police them — threaten them personally with abuse, discrimination, harassment, the loss of life or other irreparable harm.
> “How can we continue to give this get-out-of-jail card to these platforms that constantly do nothing to address the foreseeable, obvious and repeated misuse of their products and services to cause harm? That was kind of our operating premise,” Warner said.
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> Ultimately, it would be up to a judge to decide the merits of these claims; the bill mostly opens the door for web users to argue their cases without running as much risk of having them dismissed early. Facebook, Google, Twitter and other social-media sites stand to lose these highly coveted federal protections under Warner’s bill only in the case of abusive paid content, such as online advertisements, that seek to defraud or scam customers….
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> Posted in cheap speech
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> Feb. 12 Event: “After the people vote: A book event with John C. Fortier”
> Posted on February 5, 2021 7:54 am by Rick Hasen
> This looks great:
> Election Day is just the beginning of a long and complex process to count, certify, and ultimately inaugurate the next president of the United States. The fourth edition of “After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College” (AEI Press, 2020) outlines the procedures that are set in motion after the polls close for the November general election. Edited by AEI’s John C. Fortier with chapters by AEI’s Karlyn Bowman and Norman J. Ornstein and other experts on the Electoral College, the book explores the mechanisms behind this uniquely American institution, including the processes for selecting electors, counting electoral votes, resolving disputes, and handling office vacancies.
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> Please join us for a discussion about the Electoral College and its future in American politics, with AEI’s Karlyn Bowman, John C. Fortier, and Adam J. White and the University of Iowa’s Derek T. Muller.
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> Posted in electoral college
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> Small Donors, Political Extremism, and Marjorie Taylor Greene
> Posted on February 5, 2021 7:28 am by Richard Pildes
> Open Secrets reports a completely unsurprising piece of news:
> The House took steps to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) of her committee assignments Thursday, punishing the freshman member for trafficking baseless conspiracy theories and promoting violence against Democrats before taking office. 
> Meanwhile, Greene is capitalizing on the controversy to raise big money from small donors loyal to former President Donald Trump….
> Without committees to serve on, Greene’s legislating power in Congress will be limited. But she’s more popular than ever with grassroots donors. Late last month, Greene said she’d raised $1.6 million amid the media’s coverage of her controversial comments. Greene said she raised $150,000 on Tuesday and $175,000 on Wednesday as calls to remove her from committees grew louder. While Green apologized for her comments in private, she showed no remorse in a flurry of fundraising emails asking supporters for campaign cash.
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> Greene appears primed to join dozens of Republicans raising huge sums from small donors by tying themselves to Trump. Amid backlash within her own party, the freshman congresswoman claimed she had support of Trump, a powerful ally who wants to retain influence over the GOP. Many of Trump’s top allies — including Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) — have tapped Trump’s grassroots supporters to become top small-dollar fundraisers. …
> Greene raked in campaign cash from bite-sized donors as she baselessly claimed the election was stolen from Trump. According to recent Federal Election Commission filings covering Nov. 24 to Dec. 31, Greene raised 91 percent of her roughly $232,000 haul from small donors. That’s an almost unprecedented figure for any member of Congress, let alone a lawmaker representing a noncompetitive district. 
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> Posted in Uncategorized
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> “How to Change Incentives for both Politicians and Donors”
> Posted on February 4, 2021 6:05 pm by Rick Hasen
> Ian Vandewalker at Brennan:
> In a recent blog post, law professor and election law expert Richard Pildes raised a concern about the For the People Act (H.R. 1/S. 1), the major democracy reform package moving through Congress. He notes that the campaign finance reform provisions would provide matching funds to multiply the value of small donations to candidates at a rate of six-to-one.
> This program, which also dramatically lowers contribution limits for candidates who participate, would amplify the voices of regular people and allow more diverse candidates to run competitive campaigns without having to raise large amounts of money from special interests. Recent elections have shown how much it is needed — even as we’ve seen massive increases in the number of small donors in 2018 and 2020, the amount of money coming from big donors was still far greater.
> Pildes’s issue, however, is “whether small donors tend to fuel the ideological extremes of the parties.” It’s an understandable question, and the evidence is that it does not.
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> To the contrary, we have shown that the weight of social science evidence does not support the notion that small donors are uniquely polarizing. For example, one study from 2016 finds that states with higher limits on individual contributions have more ideologically extreme legislators. The obvious takeaway is that large donors are polarizing. The study says nothing about small donors….
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> Posted in Uncategorized
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> “Fox News Is Sued by Election Technology Company for Over $2.7 Billion”
> Posted on February 4, 2021 3:03 pm by Rick Hasen
> NYT:
> In the latest volley in the battle over disinformation in the presidential election, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation has been sued by an obscure tech company that has accused his cable networks of defamation and contributing to the fervor that led to the siege of the Capitol.
> The suit pits Smartmatic, which provided election technology in one county, against Donald J. Trump’s longtime favorite news outlet and three Fox anchors, Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro, all ardent supporters of the former president. A trial could reveal how Mr. Trump’s media backers sought to cast doubt on an election that delivered a victory to Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a loss to an incumbent who refused to accept reality.
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> Filed in New York State Supreme Court, Smartmatic’s suit seeks at least $2.7 billion in damages. In addition to Mr. Murdoch’s Fox Corporation, Fox News and the three star anchors, it targets Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, lawyers who made the case for election fraud as frequent guests on Fox programs while representing President Trump.
> In its 276-page complaint, Smartmatic, which has requested a jury trial, argues that Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell “created a story about Smartmatic” and that “Fox joined the conspiracy to defame and disparage Smartmatic and its election technology and software.”
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> Posted in Uncategorized
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> “Voting officials: Here’s how we can safeguard our upcoming elections”
> Posted on February 4, 2021 3:02 pm by Rick Hasen
> Jocelyn Benson, Katie Hobbs and Steve Simon CNN oped.
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> Posted in Uncategorized
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> “Opinion: Congress should make a deal to end partisan gerrymandering”
> Posted on February 4, 2021 2:10 pm by Rick Hasen
> Ned Foley WaPo oped:
> The country’s electoral and voting system is in dire need of fundamental change — most urgently, to deal with the pernicious practice of partisan gerrymandering. The filibuster might stand in the way of making this critical fix, but it doesn’t need to be an insurmountable roadblock.
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> Democrats and Republicans should be able to craft a deal that would secure the necessary 60 votes for Senate passage. Democrats could offer concessions to establish reasonable voter identification requirements and secure the safety of mail-in voting in exchange for Republican support for nonpartisan redistricting.
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> First, an explanation of why it is so important for Congress to tackle partisan gerrymandering….
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> And congressional action is imperative because it undermines democracy to draw district lines that produce more partisan victories than what the voters would choose to give the party if the map weren’t so distorted. As significant, this practice magnifies the preexisting problem of political polarization, making primary contests all-important and pushing candidates of both parties to extremes.
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> Posted in Uncategorized
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> “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election”
> Posted on February 4, 2021 2:05 pm by Rick Hasen
> Molly Ball for Time:
> A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”
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> In a way, Trump was right.
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> There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
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> The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.
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> Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.
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> Posted in Uncategorized
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> “Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?”
> Posted on February 4, 2021 8:22 am by Rick Hasen
> NYT reports.
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> Posted in Uncategorized
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> “Democracy’s Denominator”
> Posted on February 4, 2021 7:45 am by Nicholas Stephanopoulos
> Jowei Chen and I just posted this article, forthcoming in the California Law Review, on the consequences of changing the unit of apportionment from persons to adult citizens. The abstract is below:
> What would happen if states stopped equalizing districts’ total populations and started equalizing their citizen voting age populations (CVAPs) instead? This is not a fanciful question. Conservative activists have long clamored for states to change their unit of apportionment, and the Trump administration took many steps to facilitate this switch. Yet the question remains largely unanswered. In fact, no published work has yet addressed this issue, though it could be the most important development of the upcoming redistricting cycle. In this Article, we harness the power of randomized redistricting to investigate the representational effects of a different apportionment base. We create two sets of simulated maps—one equalizing districts’ total populations, the other equalizing their CVAPs—for ten states with particularly small CVAP shares.
> We find that minority representation would decline significantly if states were to equalize CVAP instead of total population. Across the ten states in our dataset, the proportion of minority opportunity districts would fall by a median of three percentage points (and by six or more percentage points in Arizona, Florida, New York, and Texas). On the other hand, the partisan impact of changing the unit of apportionment would be more muted. Overall, the share of Republican districts would rise by a median of just one percentage point. This conclusion holds, moreover, whether our algorithm emulates a nonpartisan mapmaker or a gerrymanderer and whether it considers one or many electoral environments. In most states—everywhere except Florida and Texas—switching the apportionment base simply does not cause major partisan repercussions.
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> Posted in Uncategorized
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> “No Evidence for Voter Fraud: A Guide To Statistical Claims About the 2020 Election”
> Posted on February 3, 2021 1:50 pm by Rick Hasen
> Andrew C. Eggers, Haritz Garro, and Justin Grimmer have posted this draft on Dropbox. Here is the abstract:
> After the 2020 US presidential election Donald Trump refused to concede, alleging widespread and unparalleled voter fraud. Trump’s supporters deployed several statistical claims that supposedly demonstrated that Joe Biden’s electoral victory in some states, or his popular vote in the country, were fraudulently obtained. Reviewing the most prominent of these statistical claims, we conclude that none of them is even remotely convincing. The common logic behind these claims is that, if the election were fairly conducted, some feature of the observed 2020 election result would be unlikely or impossible. In each case, we find that the purportedly anomalous fact is either not a fact or not anomalous.
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> Posted in Election Meltdown, fraudulent fraud squad
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> “Justice Department rescinds two Trump-era voting directives”
> Posted on February 3, 2021 1:36 pm by Rick Hasen
> CNN:
> The Justice Department on Tuesday rescinded two voting-related memos issued by the Trump administration, including one that prompted a public corruption prosecutor to step down from his post because it upended decades of department policy on voter fraud investigations to not interfere in states’ vote certification.
> Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson announced that the Justice Department will pull back the November memo from former Attorney General William Barr on vote fraud investigations and a second memo that gave Justice Department blessing to efforts by some states to pull back expansions of voting access, such as early or absentee voting, as a result of the Covid crisis.
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> Posted in Department of Justice
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> -- 
> Rick Hasen
> Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science
> UC Irvine School of Law
> 401 E. Peltason Dr., Suite 1000
> Irvine, CA 92697-8000
> 949.824.3072 - office
> rhasen at law.uci.edu
> http://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/
> http://electionlawblog.org
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